WASHINGTON —
“I love you, China. My dear mother,” former U.S. President Donald Trump, standing in front of a mic at a lectern, appears to sing in perfect Mandarin.
“I cry for you, and I also feel proud for you,” Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in this year’s election, appears to respond, also in perfect Mandarin. Trump lets out a smile as he listens to the lyric.
The video has received thousands of likes and tens of thousands of reposts on Douyin, China’s variation of TikTok.
“These two are almost as Chinese as it gets,” one comment says.
Neither Trump nor Harris knows Mandarin. And the duet shown in the video has never happened. But recently, deepfake videos, frequently featuring top U.S. leaders, including President Joe Biden, singing Chinese pop songs, have gone viral on the Chinese internet.
Some of the videos have found their way to social media platforms not available in China, such as Instagram, TikTok and X.
U.S. intelligence officials and experts have long warned about how China and other foreign adversaries have been implementing generative AI in their disinformation effort to disrupt and influence the 2024 presidential election.
“There has been an increased use of Chinese AI-generated content in recent months, attempting to influence and sow division in the U.S. and elsewhere,” a Microsoft report on China’s disinformation threat said in April.
Few of the people who saw the videos of the American leaders singing in Chinese, however, were convinced that they were real, based on what users wrote in the comments. The videos themselves do not contain misinformation, either.
Instead, these videos and their popularity reflect, at least in part, a sense of cultural confidence in Chinese netizens in the age of perpetually intensifying U.S.-China competitions, observers told VOA Mandarin.
By making the likes of Biden and Trump sing whatever Chinese songs the creators of the videos want them to sing, they can “culturally domesticate powerful Americans,” said Alexa Pan, a researcher on China’s AI industry for ChinaTalk, an influential newsletter about China and technology.
“Making fun of U.S. leaders might be especially politically acceptable to and popular with Chinese viewers,” she said.
Political opponents sing about friendship
Videos of American leaders singing in Chinese started to spread on Chinese social media in May. In many of the videos featuring Biden and Trump, creators made the two politically opposed men sing songs about friendship.
After Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race in July, one viral video had him sing to Trump, “Actually I don’t want to leave. Actually, I want to stay. I want to stay with you through every spring, summer, autumn and winter,” to which Trump appeared to sing, “You have to believe me. It won’t take long before we can spend our whole life together.”
“Crying eyes,” one Chinese netizen commented sarcastically. “They must have gotten along really well.”
Another such video posted on Instagram received mostly positive reactions. Some users said it was a stark contrast to the bitterness that has permeated U.S. politics.
“Made me laugh,” an Instagram user wrote. “Wouldn’t that be so refreshing to actually have them sing like that together?”
Easy to make
After reviewing some of the videos, Pan, of ChinaTalk, told VOA Mandarin that she believes they were quite easy to make.
Obvious flaws in the videos, including body parts occasionally blending into the background, suggest they were created with simple AI technology, Pan said.
“One could generate these videos on the many AI text-to-video generation platforms available in China,” she wrote in an e-mail.
On the Chinese internet, there are countless tutorials on how to make AI-generated videos using popular lip-syncing AI models, such as MuseTalk, released by Chinese tech giant Tencent, and SadTalker, developed by Xi’an Jiaotong University, a research-focused university in northwestern China.
One Douyin account reviewed by VOA Mandarin has pumped out over 200 videos of American leaders singing in Chinese since May. One of the account’s videos was even reposted by the Iranian embassy.
Chinese leaders off-limits
The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2022 has triggered a global AI frenzy, with China being one of the leading countries developing the technology. The United Nations said in July that China had requested the most patents on generative AI, with the U.S. being a distant second.
On the Chinese internet, the obsession has been particularly strong with deepfakes, which can be used to manipulate videos, images and audio of people to make them appear to say or sing things that they have not actually uttered.
Some deepfake videos are made mostly for fun, such is the case with Biden and Trump singing Chinese songs. But there have also been abuses of the technology. Earlier this year, web users in China stole a Ukrainian girl’s image and turned her into a “Russian beauty” to sell goods online.
China has released strict regulations on deepfakes. A 2022 law states that the technology cannot be used to “endanger the national security and interests, harm the image of the nation, harm the societal public interest, disturb economic or social order, or harm the lawful rights and interests of others.”
Yang Han, an Australian commentator who used to work for China’s Foreign Ministry, told VOA Mandarin that the prominence of U.S leaders and the absence of Chinese leaders in these viral AI videos reflects a lack of political free speech in China.
He said that it reminds him of a joke that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan used to tell during the Cold War.
“An American and a Russian compare with each other whose country has more freedom,” Yang said, relaying the joke. “The American says he can stand in front of the White House and call Reagan stupid. The Russian dismisses it and says he can also stand in front of the Kremlin and call Reagan stupid.”
